Technical plumbing

How to refactor an old website for AEO

By Arnav Mukherjee, founder of TofuBofu · July 6, 2026

Here is a mistake I made on our own site, and I am not a beginner at this. Our early homepage led with the industries we serve, IT firms, MSPs, cybersecurity, consulting. It read well to a human. But when I ran an automated read of the page, it classified us as an IT services company, not an AI visibility platform. We had buried our own category under our audience. If a tool could not tell what we were, neither could the engines.

The fix was not a rebuild. It was a wording change and a bit of structure. That is the theme of refactoring an old site for AEO: most of what holds legacy sites back is fixable in place, in the right order, without burning the whole thing down.

Refactor, do not rebuild

The instinct when a site underperforms in AI search is to assume it is too old and needs replacing. Rebuilds are expensive, risky, and usually solve the wrong problem. An old site typically has three fixable issues: AI crawlers cannot read it, they cannot tell what it is, or its content does not answer the questions buyers ask. You address those in sequence, and you keep the site.

Step 1: Audit before you touch anything

Three quick checks tell you where the problem actually is. Open yoursite.com/robots.txt and confirm you are not blocking AI crawlers like GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, or Google-Extended. View the page source on your top pages and confirm your real text is in it, not just in the rendered view. And run a scan to see what AI engines say about you today.

This diagnosis matters because the fixes are different. A crawler block or empty source is a technical problem. A confident but wrong answer about what you do is a clarity problem. A generic answer that names competitors is a content problem. Fix the one you actually have.

Step 2: Fix access and rendering first

Nothing else works until crawlers can read you. If robots.txt is blocking AI bots, unblock them. If the view-source test showed an empty shell, your content is being drawn by JavaScript in the browser and AI crawlers cannot see it, so getting your platform to serve server-rendered HTML is the priority. These two fixes can restore visibility on their own, because they take you from invisible to readable.

Step 3: Make your category unmistakable

This is the one that bit us. Old sites love a clever tagline or an audience-first headline, and both hide your category. State plainly what you are, high on the homepage and in your Organization schema, then describe who you serve. If an AI engine cannot classify you, it cannot recommend you for the right queries, no matter how good the rest of the site is. This is a wording change with outsized impact.

Step 4: Add structure and schema

Legacy pages are often a slab of prose with a hero image. Break the key ones into real headings that mirror buyer questions, clear lists, and an FAQ section marked up with schema through your platform's plugin or custom-code field. This is what lets an engine lift a clean, quotable passage from your page. It is content and settings work, not engineering.

Step 5: Rewrite for the questions buyers ask

Now the compounding work. Prune the thin, generic pages that exist only to catch a keyword, because AI answers those directly and they dilute your site. Then take your important pages and rewrite them to answer specific, qualified buyer questions, your service for a particular industry, situation, or need, with the answer stated first.

You end up with fewer, sharper, better-structured pages, which is exactly what AI engines cite and what an old bloated site usually lacks. Because the domain already has some history, these changes often show up a bit faster than they would on a brand-new site.

Which pages to refactor first

An old site can have hundreds of pages, and trying to fix them all at once is how a refactor stalls. You do not need to. A small number of pages carry almost all the AEO value, so order the work by impact and stop worrying about the rest.

A simple heuristic if you want to score pages yourself: how close is this page to a buying decision, and how specific is the question it answers? High on both means refactor now. Low on both means leave it. Work top-down through that list and you will see movement long before you have touched the whole site.